How To Make A Company More Like Google

What if you stopped hiring based on someone's impressive resume and started hiring based on how someone would fit in at your business instead? It might sound counter-intuitive, but hiring for the sake of culture instead of skills can really improve your business.

Consider the successful companies that we know to have solid and distinct office cultures, such as Google and Apple. Don't you want your business included among these names? Yes, skills matter. But they don't say anything about a person's values and they don't even come close to telling someone's entire story. Consider yourself—isn't there more to you than the list of places you've worked? The same is true of everyone you'll interview. Be open-minded. Be genuinely curious about them.

Grand Circle, a leadership organization, has shared on its blog three guidelines to follow in order to make sure that your potential recruit will be a solid fit at his or her new job.

1. Don't just ask him if he holds similar values to the company—make him show you that he does. Set up the interview so that he interacts with current employees and other candidates. You'll learn quite a bit by observing how he handles talking to new people. If he is distant and reserved, he's not a good fit for a customer service job, for example. If he's sweaty and nervous, he's not good under fire.

2. Be completely clear about your company's culture and values. Don't hire someone destined to fail. It's a waste of your time as well as his. You shouldn't have to spend a few months waiting for your hire to learn the ropes or get uncomfortable and quit. If that happens, you are the one to blame, not him.

3. Don't combine a skills assessment with a values assessment. When you assess skills and values with two separate interviews, you'll almost certainly learn something you never would have learned otherwise. When you only assess job skills, you learn nothing about the person's ambition or leadership.

It's important to keep all these things in consideration when you're looking to recruit new talent. When you hire someone with values that complement your own, it adds even more momentum to your business. And during an interview, you only have a brief window of time to figure out if you want to see this person every day for several years.